Iʼm pleased to announce that LLVM 8 is now available. Get it here: [5]https://llvm.org/releases/download.html#8.0.0 This release contains the work on trunk up to Subversion revision r351319, plus work on... mehr anzeigen

Iʼm pleased to announce that LLVM 8 is now available. Get it here: [5]https://llvm.org/releases/download.html#8.0.0 This release contains the work on trunk up to Subversion revision r351319, plus work on the release branch. Itʼs the result of the LLVM communityʼs work over the past six months, including: speculative load hardening, concurrent compilation in the ORC JIT API, no longer experimental WebAssembly target, a Clang option to initialize automatic variables, improved pre-compiled header support in clang-cl, the /Zc:dllexportInlines- flag, RISC-V support in lld. And as usual, many bug fixes, optimization and diagnostics improvements, etc. For more details, see the release notes: [6]https://llvm.org/releases/8.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html [7]https://llvm.org/releases/8.0.0/tools/clang/docs/ReleaseNotes.html [8]https://llvm.org/releases/8.0.0/tools/clang/tools/extra/docs/ReleaseNotes.html [9]https://llvm.org/releases/8.0.0/tools/lld/docs/ReleaseNotes.html [10]https://llvm.org/releases/8.0.0/projects/libcxx/docs/ReleaseNotes.html Special thanks to the release testers and packagers: Amy Kwan, Bero Rosenkränzer, Brian Cain, Diana Picus, Dimitry Andric, Kim Gräsman, Lei Huang, Michał Górny, Sylvestre Ledru, Ulrich Weigand, Vedant Kumar, and Yvan Roux. For questions or comments about the release, please contact the community on the mailing lists. Onwards to LLVM 9! Thanks, Hans

When Microsoft began testing its Windows 10 20H1 release more than a year before it is expected to start rolling out, many company watchers wondered why. The answer may be more boring -- and a lot more complicated -- than you'd think.

Today we have made available updates to Nextcloud 15, 14 and 13, which aim to improve the stability, security and reliability of your server. We restrict minor updates to bug fixes and minor, non-intrusive improvements because both home and enterprise users need to know that these upgrades are safe and reliable. Customers can rely on the stand-by upgrade support from Nextcloud GmbH if needed.

As usual, we’d like to remind you: Don’t forget to update your app regularly too. Up to date = more secure!

Improvements in this release

As always, the changes are small and will make for a safe and reliable update.

With 40 new changes, Nextcloud 15.0.5 brings UI improvements, fixes in link shares and improves the brute force protection security feature. Nextcloud 14.0.7, with a bit less than 20 changes, shows to be a very mature version.

The list of changes in Nextcloud 13.0.11 – only 4 changes – is even smalle... mehr anzeigen

Today we have made available updates to Nextcloud 15, 14 and 13, which aim to improve the stability, security and reliability of your server. We restrict minor updates to bug fixes and minor, non-intrusive improvements because both home and enterprise users need to know that these upgrades are safe and reliable. Customers can rely on the stand-by upgrade support from Nextcloud GmbH if needed.

As usual, we’d like to remind you: Don’t forget to update your app regularly too. Up to date = more secure!

Improvements in this release

As always, the changes are small and will make for a safe and reliable update.

With 40 new changes, Nextcloud 15.0.5 brings UI improvements, fixes in link shares and improves the brute force protection security feature. Nextcloud 14.0.7, with a bit less than 20 changes, shows to be a very mature version.

The list of changes in Nextcloud 13.0.11 – only 4 changes – is even smaller. As it gets really close the end of its public support cycle, we strongly recommend users to migrate to Nextcloud 14. If you are still on Nextcloud 13 and want to continue to keep your data secure, request access to the Long Term Support service of Nextcloud GmbH for further security and stability updates.

What’s new?

As usual, here are some highlights from today’s release. The list is, of course, much longer, and you can find a full overview of the changes we released in our changelog.In all versions:

The delay brute force protection was slightly reduced to be below 30 seconds, thus improving the solidity of clients and reducing the risk of creating timeout issues.

The casing of LDAP attributes was fixed

The SMB library wrapper was updated

In Nextcloud 14.0.7 and 15.0.4:

The owner of files or folder can now be correctly determinated when shared external storage is used

The recent files list was fixed

Javascript dependencies were updated

In Nextcloud 15.0.4 only:

The original path of files in the trashbin can be shown

The expiration date changes for link shares were fixed

Uploads of empty files on S3 primary storage were fixed

PHP 7.3 incompatibility issues were corrected

Many UI fixes

Stay safe: keep your server up-to-date!

Minor Nextcloud releases are security and functionality bug fixes, not rewrites of major systems that risk user data! We also do extensive testing, both in our code base and by upgrading a series of real-world systems to the test versions. This ensures that upgrades to minor releases are painless and reliable. As the updates not only fix feature issues but also security problems, it is a bad idea to not upgrade!

This is, of course, also true for apps: Keeping them updated has security benefits, besides the new features and other bug fixes.

This is a maintenance release, containing minor bug fixes and improvements that are not worthy of being highlighted on their own.

Updating

For podmins, update instructions are available as usual in the wiki. For those of you who have been testing the release candidate, run git checkout master before the update to get back to the stable release branch.Next minor freeze (0.7.11.0): 2019-03-24Next release (0.7.11.0): 2019-03-31

This is a maintenance release, containing minor bug fixes and improvements that are not worthy of being highlighted on their own.

Updating

For podmins, update instructions are available as usual in the wiki. For those of you who have been testing the release candidate, run git checkout master before the update to get back to the stable release branch.Next minor freeze (0.7.11.0): 2019-03-24Next release (0.7.11.0): 2019-03-31

This is a maintenance release, containing minor bug fixes and improvements that are not worthy of being highlighted on their own.

Updating

For podmins, update instructions are available as usual in the wiki. For those of you who have been testing the release candidate, run git checkout master before the update to get back to the stable release branch.Next minor freeze (0.7.11.0): 2019-03-24Next release (0.7.11.0): 2019-03-31

This is a maintenance release, containing minor bug fixes and improvements that are not worthy of being highlighted on their own.

Updating

For podmins, update instructions are available as usual in the wiki. For those of you who have been testing the release candidate, run git checkout master before the update to get back to the stable release branch.Next minor freeze (0.7.11.0): 2019-03-24Next release (0.7.11.0): 2019-03-31

diaspora* 0.7.10.0 freeze

As scheduled, we froze diaspora* minor release 0.7.10.0. Please check the Changelog for more information on changes included in this release.

If you are running your own pod, please help us test the RC before the minor gets released next Sunday. To get the code, run git pull; git checkout release/0.7.10.0 on your development pod. Please be aware that this is a release candidate and, although we did careful testing, bugs may occur. Follow the usual update instructions to get your testing system updated.Next release (0.7.10.0): 2019-02-24Next minor freeze (0.7.11.0): 2019-03-24

diaspora* 0.7.10.0 freeze

As scheduled, we froze diaspora* minor release 0.7.10.0. Please check the Changelog for more information on changes included in this release.

If you are running your own pod, please help us test the RC before the minor gets released next Sunday. To get the code, run git pull; git checkout release/0.7.10.0 on your development pod. Please be aware that this is a release candidate and, although we did careful testing, bugs may occur. Follow the usual update instructions to get your testing system updated.Next release (0.7.10.0): 2019-02-24Next minor freeze (0.7.11.0): 2019-03-24

Today we have made available security and stability updates to Nextcloud 15, 14 and 13. These aim to improve the stability, security and reliability of your server. We restrict minor updates to bug fixes and minor, non-intrusive improvements because both home and enterprise users need

Today we have made available security and stability updates to Nextcloud 15, 14 and 13. These aim to improve the stability, security and reliability of your server. We restrict minor updates to bug fixes and minor, non-intrusive improvements because both home and enterprise users need to know that these upgrades are safe and reliable. Customers can rely on the stand-by upgrade support from Nextcloud GmbH if needed.

As there are many new and updated apps, remember: Up to date means more secure. And don’t forget to update your apps regularly too!

Improvements in this release

Nextcloud 15.0.4 brings a little over 40 changes, from fixes in file versioning and uploading to small user interface and design improvements, especially in the high contrast and accessibility theme. Nextcloud 14.0.7, with a bit less than 30 changes, is bringing 14 closer to a very mature version.

As always, the changes are small and will make for a safe and reliable update.

The list of changes in Nextcloud 13.0.11 is even smaller. As it nears the end of its public support cycle, we strongly recommend users to migrate to Nextcloud 14. If you are still on Nextcloud 13 and want to continue to keep your data secure, request access to the Long Term Support service of Nextcloud GmbH for further security and stability updates.

What’s new?

Of course the list is much longer, but here are some highlights from today’s release. You can find a full overview of changes in our changelog.

In all versions:

The drag and drop upload of a Folder into a Nextcloud folder are fixed in the web UI

A better cleanup of stray locks helps reduce “File locked” errors

Some versions of dependencies were updated

In Nextcloud 14.0.7 and 15.0.4:

For Swift’s v2 authentication users: tokens are now cached

Upload to object store storage has been improved

A repair job that failed in some corner cases was fixed

The user’s locale is now defining the file listing order

In Nextcloud 15.0.4 only:

Versions of shared files are shown for all users again

A series of small UI and UX fixes were made, especially in the high contrast and accessibility theme

A multipart uploader is now always used for S3 storages

As issue that caused the list of deleted files to not appear in the “Deleted files” section was fixed

Stay safe: keep your server up-to-date!

Minor Nextcloud releases are security and functionality bug fixes, not rewrites of major systems that risk user data! We also do extensive testing, both in our code base and by upgrading a series of real-world systems to the test versions. This ensures that upgrades to minor releases are painless and reliable. As the updates not only fix feature issues but also security problems, it is a bad idea to not upgrade!

This is, of course, also true for apps: Keeping them updated has security benefits, besides the new features and other bug fixes.

Today we have made available security and stability updates to Nextcloud 15, 14 and 13. These aim to improve the stability, security and reliability of your server. We restrict minor updates to bug fixes and minor, non-intrusive improvements because both home and enterprise users need to know that these upgrades are safe and reliable. Customers can rely on the stand-by upgrade support from Nextcloud GmbH if needed.

As there are many new and updated apps, remember: Up to date means more secure. And don’t forget to update your apps regularly too!

Improvements in this release

Nextcloud 15.0.4 brings a little over 40 changes, from fixes in file versioning and uploading to small user interface and design improvements, especially in the high contrast and accessibility theme. Nextcloud 14.0.7, with a bit less than 30 changes, is bringing 14 closer to a very mature version.

As always, the changes are small and will make for a safe a... mehr anzeigen

Today we have made available security and stability updates to Nextcloud 15, 14 and 13. These aim to improve the stability, security and reliability of your server. We restrict minor updates to bug fixes and minor, non-intrusive improvements because both home and enterprise users need to know that these upgrades are safe and reliable. Customers can rely on the stand-by upgrade support from Nextcloud GmbH if needed.

As there are many new and updated apps, remember: Up to date means more secure. And don’t forget to update your apps regularly too!

Improvements in this release

Nextcloud 15.0.4 brings a little over 40 changes, from fixes in file versioning and uploading to small user interface and design improvements, especially in the high contrast and accessibility theme. Nextcloud 14.0.7, with a bit less than 30 changes, is bringing 14 closer to a very mature version.

As always, the changes are small and will make for a safe and reliable update.

The list of changes in Nextcloud 13.0.11 is even smaller. As it nears the end of its public support cycle, we strongly recommend users to migrate to Nextcloud 14. If you are still on Nextcloud 13 and want to continue to keep your data secure, request access to the Long Term Support service of Nextcloud GmbH for further security and stability updates.

What’s new?

Of course the list is much longer, but here are some highlights from today’s release. You can find a full overview of changes in our changelog.

In all versions:

The drag and drop upload of a Folder into a Nextcloud folder are fixed in the web UI

A better cleanup of stray locks helps reduce “File locked” errors

Some versions of dependencies were updated

In Nextcloud 14.0.7 and 15.0.4:

For Swift’s v2 authentication users: tokens are now cached

Upload to object store storage has been improved

A repair job that failed in some corner cases was fixed

The user’s locale is now defining the file listing order

In Nextcloud 15.0.4 only:

Versions of shared files are shown for all users again

A series of small UI and UX fixes were made, especially in the high contrast and accessibility theme

A multipart uploader is now always used for S3 storages

As issue that caused the list of deleted files to not appear in the “Deleted files” section was fixed

Stay safe: keep your server up-to-date!

Minor Nextcloud releases are security and functionality bug fixes, not rewrites of major systems that risk user data! We also do extensive testing, both in our code base and by upgrading a series of real-world systems to the test versions. This ensures that upgrades to minor releases are painless and reliable. As the updates not only fix feature issues but also security problems, it is a bad idea to not upgrade!

This is, of course, also true for apps: Keeping them updated has security benefits, besides the new features and other bug fixes.

A lot is happening in Nextcloud and once a year it makes sense to summarize and talk about how things are going. In our press release we shared that the momentum of Nextcloud continues, with our company more than doubling our customer base in 2018, gaining some major customers like the German Federal Government, cities like Bern and dozens of manufacturing, finance, health, education and research organizations across the world. We do this, growing organically, by focusing on building the future of enterprise team productivity technology!

... mehr anzeigen

A lot is happening in Nextcloud and once a year it makes sense to summarize and talk about how things are going. In our press release we shared that the momentum of Nextcloud continues, with our company more than doubling our customer base in 2018, gaining some major customers like the German Federal Government, cities like Bern and dozens of manufacturing, finance, health, education and research organizations across the world. We do this, growing organically, by focusing on building the future of enterprise team productivity technology!

Strong execution in our sales team has more than doubled our customer base and we added three more team members in the last few months. Customer demand in secure, self-hosted productivity solutions continues to grow and we look to expand our team further to provide the market with the best possible solution.

Attention for privacy and compliance

While 2018 was a great year for Nextcloud, it was a bad year for privacy. Or perhaps good, given the unprecedented amount of press and political coverage of privacy violations and the introduction of the GDPR. These developments have have brought Nextcloud to the attention of a larger audience as the easiest way to regain control over sensitive data. With website traffic nearly doubling to over 300.000 unique visitors per month, the interest in Nextcloud was overwhelming and coverage by major outlets like Le Monde in France and Der Spiegel in Germany helped draw a new audience.

Alexa showing growth in website visitors

Jos Poortvliet, head of marketing, shared that:

Every one of the last four months of 2018 set new a record for website visitors and 2019 is set to continue that trend. Our forums saw thousands of active users every month post 150-200 messages per day, we had 500 new twitter followers every month, our conference grew by a third to over 200 people – 2018 showed stunning growth for Nextcloud.

The largest self-hosted productivity ecosystem

The Nextcloud ecosystem has grown to be the largest in the self-hosted productivity market with well over 200 apps built by over 150 different private developers and businesses. In the Android app store users can now find 17 Android apps which interact with or are developed exclusively for Nextcloud, like an SMS app, three bookmark handling apps, two password managers, a Deck Kanban app, several notes apps and more. Over 500 individuals contributed to the Nextcloud code base during 2018. The launch of Nextcloud Include with funding from the Reinhard von König Preis for innovation received by Nextcloud founder Frank Karlitschek brings support for growing diversity and creativity in the community. Integration announcements with third party technologies like Rocket.Chat, Moodle, Storj.io, Mastodon and others make it easier for customers to deeply integrate Nextcloud in their infrastructure.

Our focus on building innovative technology while delivering customers direct access to top engineering knowledge has enabled us to continue grow and service a quickly expanding customer base. Nextcloud has established itself as the defacto standard solution for self-hosted productivity. With the tech preview announcement today of Virtual Drive integration in the Nextcloud Desktop Client and our Customer Advisory Board, Nextcloud continues to lead the market in innovation while delivering value to customers.

Announcements today

As Frank alluded to, today we also announced the upcoming Virtual Drive technology in the Nextcloud Desktop Client and the establishment of a Customer Advisory Board to help align development with the needs of our most valued customers.

As always a HUGE thanks to everybody who helped make this success possible! Nextcloud wouldn’t be where it is without the incredible support of our community. So give yourself a pat on the back for this one, YOU made private and secure file sharing on the internet possible!

Today we’ve released a major update to our Android app for Talk to the Play Store and f-droid. This version has a reworked user interface, can load remote images including animations (GIFs!), can show you screen sharing and has an Emoji keyboard.

a shared gif and the emoji keyboardScreensharingRight now, you have to copy a direct URL to a gif, like the ‘social’ link you get from giphy on its media page.

Welcome to 2019! There are new updates to your favorite cloud productivity software and we recommend you update as soon as you can! Nextcloud 13.0.10, 14.0.6 and 15.0.2 contain important improvements and updates should be safe and quick. Update your server to improve the reliability and benefit from security fixes. Remember, you don’t control your data if it isn’t secure! As always, customers can rely on the stand-by upgrade support from Nextcloud GmbH if needed.

Note: we roll out updates incrementally, so most servers on 14.0.x don’t get a notification for Nextcloud 15 yet. Either be patient (we hope to go to ~50% this week) or switch to the beta channel and reload the page to get the 15.0.2 notification right now. Don’t forget to switch back to the stable channel after updating!

What’s new

We’ll coalesce the change log of two minor releases, as 13.0.10, 14.0.6 and 15.0.2 were small upd... mehr anzeigen

Welcome to 2019! There are new updates to your favorite cloud productivity software and we recommend you update as soon as you can! Nextcloud 13.0.10, 14.0.6 and 15.0.2 contain important improvements and updates should be safe and quick. Update your server to improve the reliability and benefit from security fixes. Remember, you don’t control your data if it isn’t secure! As always, customers can rely on the stand-by upgrade support from Nextcloud GmbH if needed.

Note: we roll out updates incrementally, so most servers on 14.0.x don’t get a notification for Nextcloud 15 yet. Either be patient (we hope to go to ~50% this week) or switch to the beta channel and reload the page to get the 15.0.2 notification right now. Don’t forget to switch back to the stable channel after updating!

What’s new

We’ll coalesce the change log of two minor releases, as 13.0.10, 14.0.6 and 15.0.2 were small updates to the previous updates thanks to some last minute fixes we decided should be shipped as soon as possible to users. This includes security-relevant hardenings and fixes, so upgrade now!

The most notable changes:

Calendar/Contacts fixes that improve the cancel-event messages, vcard handling and, activity support and reliability of the calendar

No more 12 releases!

Note that Nextcloud 12 is no longer receiving security and stability updates. If you really need to stay with Nextcloud 12 for some more time, we strongly recommend contacting Nextcloud GmbH for Long Term Support.

Time to upgrade to 14!

If you are still in Nextcloud 13, it is time to update. The majority of our user base has already moved to Nextcloud 14 or 15 and we will move Nextcloud to our customer-only Long Term Support service for further security and stability updates.

Stay safe: keep your server up-to-date!

Minor Nextcloud releases are security and functionality bug fixes, not rewrites of major systems that risk user data! We also do extensive testing, both in our code base and by upgrading a series of real-world systems to the test versions. This ensures that upgrades to minor releases are painless and reliable. As the updates not only fix feature issues but also security problems, it is a bad idea to not upgrade!

This is also true for apps: keeping them updated has security benefits, besides the new features and other bug fixes.

Notable Changes

* The /public stream should be much faster now if you are using PostgreSQL. This is just the first step of many to come to improve the performance of all streams and tag pages.* The recent change to support full-resolution photos introduced issues with the thumbnails. This issue has been addressed.* The mobile-optimized interface now supports ignoring users.

Updating

For podmins, update instructions are available as usual in the wiki. For those of you who have been testing the release candidate, run git checkout master before the update to get back to the stable release branch.Next minor freeze (0.7.10.0): 2019-02-10Next release (0.7.10.0): 2019-02-17

Notable Changes

* The /public stream should be much faster now if you are using PostgreSQL. This is just the first step of many to come to improve the performance of all streams and tag pages.* The recent change to support full-resolution photos introduced issues with the thumbnails. This issue has been addressed.* The mobile-optimized interface now supports ignoring users.

Updating

For podmins, update instructions are available as usual in the wiki. For those of you who have been testing the release candidate, run git checkout master before the update to get back to the stable release branch.Next minor freeze (0.7.10.0): 2019-02-10Next release (0.7.10.0): 2019-02-17

Notable Changes

* The /public stream should be much faster now if you are using PostgreSQL. This is just the first step of many to come to improve the performance of all streams and tag pages.* The recent change to support full-resolution photos introduced issues with the thumbnails. This issue has been addressed.* The mobile-optimized interface now supports ignoring users.

Updating

For podmins, update instructions are available as usual in the wiki. For those of you who have been testing the release candidate, run git checkout master before the update to get back to the stable release branch.Next minor freeze (0.7.10.0): 2019-02-10Next release (0.7.10.0): 2019-02-17

Notable Changes

* The /public stream should be much faster now if you are using PostgreSQL. This is just the first step of many to come to improve the performance of all streams and tag pages.* The recent change to support full-resolution photos introduced issues with the thumbnails. This issue has been addressed.* The mobile-optimized interface now supports ignoring users.

Updating

For podmins, update instructions are available as usual in the wiki. For those of you who have been testing the release candidate, run git checkout master before the update to get back to the stable release branch.Next minor freeze (0.7.10.0): 2019-02-10Next release (0.7.10.0): 2019-02-17

Notable Changes

* The /public stream should be much faster now if you are using PostgreSQL. This is just the first step of many to come to improve the performance of all streams and tag pages.* The recent change to support full-resolution photos introduced issues with the thumbnails. This issue has been addressed.* The mobile-optimized interface now supports ignoring users.

Updating

For podmins, update instructions are available as usual in the wiki. For those of you who have been testing the release candidate, run git checkout master before the update to get back to the stable release branch.Next minor freeze (0.7.10.0): 2019-02-10Next release (0.7.10.0): 2019-02-17

Notable Changes

* The /public stream should be much faster now if you are using PostgreSQL. This is just the first step of many to come to improve the performance of all streams and tag pages.* The recent change to support full-resolution photos introduced issues with the thumbnails. This issue has been addressed.* The mobile-optimized interface now supports ignoring users.... mehr anzeigen

diaspora\* version 0.7.9.0 released!

As scheduled, a new minor release is now released. Over the past six weeks, we have managed to collect 11 commits made by 4 contributors for this minor release.

Notable Changes

* The /public stream should be much faster now if you are using PostgreSQL. This is just the first step of many to come to improve the performance of all streams and tag pages.* The recent change to support full-resolution photos introduced issues with the thumbnails. This issue has been addressed.* The mobile-optimized interface now supports ignoring users.

Updating

For podmins, update instructions are available as usual in the wiki. For those of you who have been testing the release candidate, run git checkout master before the update to get back to the stable release branch.Next minor freeze (0.7.10.0): 2019-02-10Next release (0.7.10.0): 2019-02-17

Price transparency stumbled out of the gate last week as hospitals complied with a new CMS requirement to publish their retail charges online for individual services and diagnosis-related groups.Article word count: 992

Price transparency stumbled out of the gate last week as hospitals complied with a new CMS requirement to publish their retail charges online for individual services and diagnosis-related groups.Article word count: 992

Price transparency stumbled out of the gate last week as hospitals complied with a [1]new CMS requirement to publish their lengthy list of retail charges for individual services and diagnosis-related groups in online spreadsheets by the first of the year.

Some hospitals, such as [2]Northwestern Memorial in Chicago, posted a link to their charges right on their home pages. Most others, such as [3]HCAʼs Aventura Hospital, posted the data deeper inside their websites, requiring a search and multiple clicks. One system, [4]MedStar, said it wonʼt post the information until next week because itʼs still working to ensure accuracy and clarity.

In the case of Sutter Health, the information appeared on the systemʼs website as a [5]blob of incomprehensible script. A Sutter spokeswoman said the data was published in the .JSON format, which she called "a machine-readable format that complies with the rule."

That drew criticism from a consumer advocate. "If Sutter thinks theyʼre abiding by the letter of the law, they certainly arenʼt abiding by the spirit," said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access.

Even when the chargemaster data were published prominently and clearly, hospital executives and consumer advocates say the information is useless or even misleading to the general public. "The unfortunate thing is that for most consumers, because itʼs standard charges not related to their coverage, itʼs not that helpful," said Rick Gundling, senior vice president of the Healthcare Financial Management Association. "It was an exercise that doesnʼt add a lot of value to the consumer."

Meanwhile, officials at [6]hospitals that have invested in online tools allowing patients to get reliable estimates of how much they would pay out of pocket for various services hoped publicity about the new sticker prices would draw attention to their more consumer-friendly transparency efforts. These include [7]Baylor Scott & White Health in Texas, [8]St. Clair Hospital in Pittsburgh, and [9]El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Calif.

In explaining the CMS-required price data on their websites, those hospital systems encouraged consumers to use their personalized cost estimators for calculating out-of-pocket prices. The estimates are based on individual consumersʼ health plan benefits and deductible status. "Itʼs shining a light on something weʼre excited to already have worked on," said Julie Smith, a spokeswoman at Baylor Scott & White. "We think our tool is something patients will find more useful."

Last August, the CMS finalized the rule [10]requiring hospitals to publish a list of their standard charges in a machine-readable format and to update the information at least once a year, in line with a provision of the Affordable Care Act that was never enforced. There currently are no penalties for non-compliance, though the agency is considering how to enforce the rule.

The measure is part of a broader initiative by HHS Secretary Alex Azar and CMS Administrator Seema Verma to foster price transparency for medical services, prescription drugs and health plans.

"We need to do something about rising cost, and a key pillar is to empower patients with the information they need to drive cost and quality," Verma [11]wrote in a November blog. She added that the administration wants to make it easy for patients to analyze cost differences across all care options.

But there was [12]broad agreement that posting chargemaster prices and average DRG costs is not going to achieve that goal, though the CMS rule sends a directional signal for healthcare industry groups.

The retail price spreadsheets posted by hospitals included charges for thousands of services, which typically listed a procedure code and an often-cryptic description of the service. There usually were multiple prices for similar-sounding services. "You have to start somewhere on transparency, but these charges are not indicative of what anyone really pays for hospital services other than Saudi Arabian kings," said Niall Brennan, CEO of the Health Care Cost Institute, which offers a consumer-focused website with price information for hundreds of healthcare services. "And do we really expect consumers to go to the websites of three or five hospitals in their area to compare the made-up numbers known as hospital charges?" he continued. "How will that help them figure out the most efficient place to get care?" Many hospitals acknowledged these limitations in their website prefaces to their chargemaster spreadsheets. They also tried to provide context by linking to their policies and guidances on financial assistance, how to avoid surprise out-of-network bills, and how to contact the hospital to get a more specific price estimate, Gundling said. "Hospital charge data is not representative of a patientʼs expected out-of-pocket costs," Northwestern Memorial Hospital wrote. "Because each patientʼs case is different based on specific medical conditions, the actual amount owed by a patient will depend on that patientʼs insurance coverage… In the vast majority of cases, however, hospitals are reimbursed by insurance companies and Medicare/Medicaid at a rate that is considerably less than the amount charged." Some hospital leaders were impatient with the CMS rule because theyʼve already moved to more advanced price transparency models.

For instance, over the last decade [13]Pomerene Memorial Hospital in Millersburg, Ohio, in the heart of Amish country, has developed bundled prices for more than 300 services. That was driven by the Amish communityʼs desire to shop for the best deal and pay in cash at the time of service.

Doing that has forced Pomerene to move ahead of most hospitals in its ability to calculate the input costs of supplies and services and come up with a set price. Tony Snyder, CEO of the 55-bed hospital, said giving consumers a package price for a set of services, such as childbirth or an orthopedic surgery, is key to true price transparency. Thatʼs what the Amish community wants, rather than a multipage bill with dozens of itemized services.

While Pomerene complied with the CMS rule and posted its chargemaster prices, "the Amish know thatʼs not the pricing theyʼre going to pay," Snyder said. "I donʼt know how anyone will be able to use that to shop for the best price."